Peacocke, Arthur. Gods Interaction with the World: The Implications of Deterministic Chaos and of Interconnected and Interdependent Complexity.

According to Arthur
Peacocke, the long-established aim in science of predicting the future
macroscopic states of natural systems has recently come to be recognized as
unattainable in practice for those systems capable of manifesting
deterministic chaos. The possibility of prediction has also been closely
associated with the conviction that there is a causal nexus which scientific
procedures will unambiguously ascertain. In this paper, Peacocke surveys the
applicability of these concepts with respect to relatively simple, dynamic,
law-obeying systems; to statistical properties of assemblies; to Newtonian
systems which are deterministic yet unpredictable; and to chaotic and
dissipative systems. In doing so he also analyzes the limitations to
predictability stemming from quantum theory.

Chaotic and dissipative
systems prove to be unpredictable in practice, primarily because of the nature
of our knowledge of the real numbers, and possibly (and more problematically)
because of quantum uncertainties. The notion of causality still proves to be
applicable to these systems in an unambiguous, even if only in a probabilistic,
fashion. However, for many significant interconnected and interdependent
complex systems the concept of causality scarcely seems applicable, since
whole-part constraints operate, whereby the state
of a system-as-a-whole influences what occurs among its constituents
at the microscopic level. Peacocke acknowledges that in the past this
phenomenon has also, perhaps somewhat misleadingly, been denoted by himself and
others as downward or top- down causation, in particular in relation to
evolution and to the brain-body relation.

Peacocke then considers how
to conceive of Gods relation to the world in the light of modifications in the
scientific concepts of predictability and causality which the phenomena of
deterministic chaos and dissipative systems on the one hand, and of whole-part
constraints on the other hand, have induced. Consideration of the former has
to take account of the possible, and as yet unclear, effects of quantum
uncertainty on chaotic and dissipative systems. Peacocke concludes that,
whatever is decided about those effects, the unpredictabilities for us of
non-linear chaotic and dissipative systems do not, as such, help us in the
problem of articulating more coherently and intelligibly how God interacts with the world, illuminating
as they are concerning the flexibilities built into natural processes. The
discussion is based in part on the assumption that God logically cannot know
the future, since it does not exist for
God to know.

However, Peacocke argues
that the notion of whole-part constraints in interconnected and
interdependent systems does provide
a new conceptual resource for modeling how God might be conceived of as
interacting with and influencing events in the world. This is particularly true
in conjunction with a prime exemplification of the whole-part constraint in the
unitive relation of the human-brain-in-the-human-body - in fact, this model of
personal agency is the biblical and traditional model for Gods action in the
world. He evokes the notion of a flow
of information as illuminating this whole-part interaction of God with the
world, which could then be conceived of as a communication by God to that part
of the world (namely, humanity) capable of discovering Gods meanings.